Worth a Letter.

The number on the notice depends on who issued it.

• Council PCN, outside London: £70 for the higher band, £50 for the lower band; halved if you pay within 14 days. Set by the Civil Enforcement of Parking Contraventions (England) General Regulations 2007 and unchanged since 2008 (Source: Civil Enforcement of Parking Contraventions (England) General Regulations 2007, SI 2007/3483.).
• Council PCN, inside London: £160 higher, £110 lower, halved within 14 days. Increased from £130 in July 2022 by the London Councils review, the first since 2011 (Source: London Councils, July 2022 fares update.).
• Private operator: £100 typical, £60 with the 14-day discount. Capped under the British Parking Association Code of Practice on most car parks. The International Parking Community sets a similar cap on its members’ sites.

The discount disappears the moment you appeal and lose. For a council PCN that means a £35 ticket can become a £70 one if the appeal goes the wrong way. The maths of when to risk the discount are why people pay on receipt; the maths of the actual win-rate at independent stage are why they probably shouldn’t.

Three independent appeals bodies decide UK parking disputes, and they all publish their numbers.

POPLA, the appeals service for the British Parking Association, decided around 38,000 cases in 2023. (Source: POPLA Annual Report 2023.) 49 per cent were decided in the motorist’s favour: 35 per cent because the assessor agreed with the motorist on the merits, plus a further 14 per cent where the operator declined to defend. The maths is the same either way. Roughly half of the drivers who go through the trouble of appealing a private ticket get it cancelled.

The Traffic Penalty Tribunal, which handles council PCN appeals for England outside London and Wales, reported 57 per cent of contested appeals decided wholly or partly in the appellant’s favour in 2023-24 (Source: Traffic Penalty Tribunal Annual Report 2023-24.). That figure rises further once you include the cases where the council fails to file evidence at all, in which case the appellant wins by default.

London Tribunals, the equivalent body for the 33 London boroughs and TfL, allowed roughly 60 per cent of the appeals it decided in 2023-24 (Source: London Tribunals statistics, 2023-24.). Around 30 per cent of council respondents simply did not contest at all, the highest non-contested rate of the three bodies.

And the Independent Appeals Service, which handles cases for International Parking Community member operators, has long had the lowest motorist-success rate of the four, in the 22 to 25 per cent range. It has been criticised by Which? and is the appeals route most often cited as a problem when the proposed Government Code is discussed.

At every tier the published numbers tell the same story: the motorist who actually files an appeal wins more often than not, and far more often than the popular sense of "it’s a fine, you owe it" suggests. And yet the share of issued tickets that ever reach an independent stage is a fraction of one per cent. The other 99 per cent get paid.

The check is a short list. Confirm who issued the notice. Confirm the date the contravention happened and the date the notice arrived. Look at the signage at the location. Look at the photographs the operator included. Decide which of the common winning grounds applies. Write the appeal letter. None of that is hard. It is just tedious enough that most people don’t.

Untap reads the photograph or PDF of your ticket, checks it against the dates, the regulations, and the most-winning grounds, and tells you whether it is worth the letter. Forward your ticket to the address inside your Untap inbox. We do not file the appeal for you. That part stays with you, on the issuer’s or POPLA’s portal.

The full how-to, with the appeal letter template, lives in our guide: UK parking fines, explained.